degree, or the licence of the College of Physicians. To render him eligible, the degree of M.D. was at once conferred on Harvey honoris causa, but after a good deal of discussion this solution of the question was held to be inadmissible, and George James Allman was appointed to the vacant chair. Harvey, however, obtained the smaller appointment of Keeper of the University Herbarium, which had fallen vacant at about the same time owing to the death of Dr Thomas Coulter, the botanical explorer of Central Mexico and California.
Harvey now at last found himself in a congenial post, with a fair amount of leisure, and facilities for scientific work. He presented his herbarium of over 10,000 species to the University, which already possessed Coulter's extensive American collections. "I am as busy as a bee these times," he writes. "I rise at 5 a.m. or before it, and work till breakfast-time (half-past eight) at the 'Antarctic Algae[1].' Directly after breakfast I start for the College, and do not leave it till five o'clock in the evening. Again at plants till dusk. I am writing on the 'Antarctic Algae,' and arranging the Herbarium, and have been working at Coulter's Mexican and Californian plants." College vacations were now usually spent at Kew, staying with his best friend Sir William Hooker, and working hard in the Herbarium. On the way home from the first of these vacations, he went to Torquay, to spend some time with his old correspondent, Mrs Griffiths. They went out boating, he and the good lady of seventy-six years; and together they visited the only British habitat of Gigartina Teedii, six miles away, and gathered that coveted sea-weed in the spot where Mrs Griffiths had discovered it in 1811, the year in which Harvey was born.
Another very rare alga which he received about this time, to his great delight, was Thuretia quercifolia from Australia, one of the most remarkable of sea-weeds, bearing oakleaf-shaped red fronds, formed of a beautiful lace-like double network with regular hexagonal openings, which he was himself destined to collect in quantity some years later at Port Phillip, and to figure in his Phycologia Australica[2].
